About New York

Five Years On, an Emptiness That Lingers

Published: October 7, 2006

A few dozen yards from the scene of an old crime against spirituality, Walter Stojanowski sits in his house on Raritan Bay and remembers his old friend Dorothy. She would always say exactly what she thought. And she had this smile, a wonderful smile, that you don’t see much in the many photographs of her.

He used to run a restaurant called the Beachcomber, a Staten Island landmark long since gone, where he held a birthday party for Dorothy maybe 30 years ago. He remembers another friend taking lots of photographs of her that day, but the friend has been unable to locate them.

“I tell him all the time to look for them pictures,” he says. “I’m sure she was smiling.”

Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have: a snapshot of Dorothy Day’s birthday smile.

The world knows Day as a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, committed to social justice, who died in 1980 at 83 and is now being considered for sainthood by the Vatican — despite her famous resistance to the idea. “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily,” she used to say.

But Mr. Stojanowski, 79, knew Day as a neighbor and friend who once lived in a small cottage he helped to secure for her. Five years after the brazen bulldozing of that cottage, he remains troubled by its absence. “It sickens me,” he says.

In 1958, Day began spending time in a house at the end of Poillon Avenue in Staten Island, hard against Raritan Bay. The island and the bay had played a role in her formation of faith as a young woman, and now she had returned, seeking a haven for writing and reflection.

She befriended some of the locals, including Mr. Stojanowski and his sister, Helen Bregulla, the owners of the Beachcomber. Day once asked him to store a wooden trunk that she said she wanted to be used as her coffin. But it became a basement playpen for children instead, and did not last as long as Day.

She moved away a few years later, but continued to feel the bay’s pull. In 1972 she asked her old friend Walter to be on the lookout for an appropriate place. He soon found a cottage for sale in Spanish Camp, a bungalow community nearby where individuals owned the cottages, but a private group owned the land beneath.

She rejoiced at the prospect, saying that she felt “at home” near the bay.

Three modest cottages were eventually bought, including one in which Day spent a lot of her time. Mr. Stojanowski sometimes sent over food from the Beachcomber, and on Sundays his sister would drive her to Mass. She signed several of her books for them. “For Walter and Helen,” she wrote inside one yellowing paperback that he keeps in a case. “With love and gratitude, Dorothy Day.”

AFTER she died, people would visit her cottage as part of a tour led by one of her biographers, Jim O’Grady. “They would stand in that small kitchen and see that old stove and those battered windows looking out on Raritan Bay,” Mr. O’Grady says. “They always got quiet.”

The owners of the Spanish Camp land eventually sold the 18-acre property to John DiScala, a developer who often seemed to revel in his lack of appreciation for the Day legacy. This impression was only underscored by his plans, which were to build two or three dozen minimansions on land where an aging Day once found solace in nature.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission thought it had an understanding with Mr. DiScala to preserve the cottage as a landmark. But one day in early 2001, as the commission prepared to schedule a hearing on the matter, the developer made it moot by bulldozing the cottage.

Outrage followed in the bulldozer’s wake, but there was little the city could do. A company involved in obtaining the demolition permit later paid a $2,500 fine after pleading guilty to possession of a forged document. And Mr. DiScala set about to building those mansions — but never did.

Problems have plagued the development, and negotiations with city officials for planning approval are at a standstill. Several lots have been sold, but only one has anything on it: an eerie, half-completed brick house. Now the entire property is up for sale, with an asking price of $40 million.

The other day Mr. Stojanowski took a walk through the overgrown land that was to be a luxury development. He pointed into some wildflowers and weeds and said that here lived Dorothy Day. No photos of her birthday smile, no cottage where she lived. Only the breathing waters of the bay, going in, going out.

E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on October 7, 2006, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Five Years On, An Emptiness That Lingers.